Virginia Tech's 24 display workstation
By Ryan Block 
posted Mar 13th 2006 2:53AM
posted Mar 13th 2006 2:53AM
[via Joystiq]
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Damn.
Damn!
I second that damn.
Engadget shud give away a few sets of these for its next competitions :D
...
complete with quake III :D :P
on second thoughts.. maybe we should try halo or cs?
no damn at all.
i see 15 FPS in the top right..
what if you would have 4 pcixpress dual head cards with 8 triple head to go devices? No linux servers, just mucho video card power! and 24 screens...
nice to see student tuition/taxpayer money/federal grants going to such a worthy project.
Looks very nice ;)
Oh, I definetly think this is a marvelous way to spend tax dollars. I just think they should hook it up to a couple quad SLi computers. That would do it, me thinks.
"impressive" :)
"excellent" :-D
Holy Moly
I'd prefer to play this through Nintendo On ;-)
Hey, I go to Virginia Tech, where is this, I wanna see :o
Virginia Tech is located in the state of Virginia. Very few, if any, tax dollars were spent on this project. Education is not a high priority to the politicians in Virginia.
12. Virginia Tech is located in the state of Virginia. Very few, if any, tax dollars were spent on this project. Education is not a high priority to the politicians in Virginia.
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Thats why it's cheaper for VA resident to go out of state to UNC, or Texas A&M (or many other out of state schools) and pay out of state rates, than to go instate to many VA schools. Must be nice for Techies to go to a school that can afford that, instead of lowering tuition rates to affordable levels. Very cool though, (guess I'm just jealous, CNU Comp Sci labs only has a handful of [new] sunblade 100 and 150s)
I worked on this at VT during my undergraduate research in 2005. It's a project being run by the HCI department under Dr. North. You can find it setup over in McBryde Hall. It's nice to see it gain some recognition. The guys who worked on it were great.
Back a while ago when our favourite toy blog reported on my dual 30" ACD setup (http://www.synapps.de/SynApps/index.php/CinemaDisplayWindows and http://www.synapps.de/SynApps/index.php/CinemaDisplayWindowsReloaded) many were making nasty fun of me (read the comments in http://www.engadget.com/2005/04/11/run-two-30-inch-apple-cinema-displays-on-your-pc/ ).
It's good to know there is always an Ueber-Geek! Thanks Virginia Tech!
They should have just continued the enclosure and made it a wrap around. 360* of Quake III goodness. Yumm.
I have a buddy who works on this sort of thing for Tech. I saw the facility when it was over in the research park. They were working on a VR room that you controlled by a hand held location beacon. It was playing Quake at the time. It was pretty damned cool back in the day - especially with a belly full of beer. Hope you're reading this Sam - no worries about puking on that chair - I was throwing it out anyway.
Similar/earlier/bigger use of Chromium:
http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/wall/8x5pics.html
That brings a tear to my eye. If only I could find an employer willing.... *sigh*
Geez. . you go to all that effort and you end up with the crosshair in the middle of 2 screens! honestly, why not just add/remove a column to get that center screen??
You can read about the project at it's site. Yes your tax dollars went into this (although you shouldn't assume that just because it's a Univ.). They study quite a bit more than just playing Quake III on it. I think the benefits of this kind of research are pretty obvious (especially to gamers, but to others as well).
http://infovis.cs.vt.edu/gigapixel/
As for the complaints about politicians here in VA not caring about education, I for one disagree there. My wife and I came to VA solely to go to school here. There are also plenty of people who come down from NY, NJ, and PA because out-of-state here is more affordable.
well that beats out my 3200x2400 display anyday
"NOOOO! I have a dead pixel!!"
Okay not to rain on their parade but... Um...
15fps? That's basically unplayable (and explains how they got a pic of a rail shot). Unfortunately, Quake III ain't scalable to multi-processors, so all those Linux boxes do you no good in this regard. Hence the pathetic framerate. (The link to the other site shows 5fps!)
For reference. My 5 year old AMD with a GeForce 3 (a what?) does 120fps solid (I even have it capped at 120).
It's still a kick-ass wall o' screens, but just not for 3D gaming.
-Pie
Engadget already reported on a bigger 50-screen monstrosity at UC Irvine.
http://www.engadget.com/2005/10/25/uc-irvines-monster-hiperwall-monitor/
I don't think it could play games though
LOL...WTF...HAHAHA I KNOW THIS GUY, he was my roomate. I knew he was working on this with some other people/freinds. Something about the web adress give it away and plus the name in the article. Damn that is some recognition. Congrats Andrew and that J.o.b.
I wonder if he knows about this posting.
Go HOKIES!
Thought I would never comment on engadget, but this is an exception.
JMU, two hours north of Virginia Tech, has a wrap-around 73 panel display built by some students who ended up starting up a company
http://www.svp-va.org/v.php?pg=46&articleID=332